Strata Week: Green pigs and data

Here are a few of the data stories that caught my attention this week:

Predicting Angry Birds

Angry Birds maker Rovio will begin using predictive analytics technology from the Seattle-based company Medio to help improve game play for its popular pig-smashing game.

According to the press release announcing the partnership, Angry Birds has been downloaded more 300 million times and is on course to reach 1 billion downloads. But it isn’t merely downloaded a lot; it’s played a lot, too. The game, which sees up to 1.4 billion minutes of game play per week, generates an incredible amount of data: user demographics, location, and device information are just a few of the data points.

Users’ data has always been important in gaming, as game developers must refine their games to maximize the amount of time players spend as well as track their willingness to spend money on extras or to click on related ads. As casual gaming becomes a bigger and more competitive industry, game makers like Rovio will rely on analytics to keep their customers engaged.

As GigaOm’s Derrick Harris notes, quoting Zynga’s recent S-1 filing, this is already a crucial part of that gaming giant’s business:

The extensive engagement of our players provides over 15 terabytes of game data per day that we use to enhance our games by designing, testing and releasing new features on an ongoing basis. We believe that combining data analytics with creative game design enables us to create a superior player experience.

By enlisting the help of Medio for predictive analytics, it’s clear that Rovio is taking that same tactic to improve the Angry Bird experience.

Unstructured data and HP’s next chapter

HP made a number of big announcements last week as it revealed plans for an overhaul. These plans include ending production of its tablet and smartphones, putting the development of WebOS on hold, and spending some $10 billion to acquire the British enterprise software company Autonomy.

The New York Times described the shift in HP as a move to “refocus the company on business products and services,” and the acquisition of Autonomy could help drive that via its big data analytics. HP’s president and CEO Léo Apotheker said in a statement: “Autonomy presents an opportunity to accelerate our strategic vision to decisively and profitably lead a large and growing space … Together with Autonomy, we plan to reinvent how both unstructured and structured data is processed, analyzed, optimized, automated and protected.”

As MIT Technology Review’s Tom Simonite puts it, HP wants Autonomy for its “math skills” and the acquisition will position HP to take advantage of the big data trend.

Founded in 1996, Autonomy has a lengthy history of analyzing data, with an emphasis on unstructured data. Citing an earlier Technology Review interview, Simonite quotes Autonomy founder Mike Lynch’s estimate that about 85% of the information inside a business is unstructured. “[W]e are human beings, and unstructured information is at the core of everything we do,” Lynch said. “Most business is done using this kind of human-friendly information.”

Simonite argues that by acquiring Autonomy, HP could “take a much more dominant position in the growing market for what Autonomy’s Lynch dubs ‘meaning-based computing.'”

Strata Conference New York 2011, being held Sept. 22-23, covers the latest and best tools and technologies for data science — from gathering, cleaning, analyzing, and storing data to communicating data intelligence effectively.

Using data to uncover stories for the Daily Dot

After several months of invitation-only testing, the web got its own official daily newspaper this week with the launch of The Daily Dot. CEO Nick White and founding editor Owen Thomas said the publication will focus on the news from various online communities and social networks.

GigaOm’s Mathew Ingram gave The Daily Dot a mixed review, calling its focus on web communities “an interesting idea,” but he questioned if the “home town newspaper” metaphor really makes sense. The number of kitten stories on the Daily Dot’s front page aside, ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick sees The Daily Dot as part of the larger trend toward data journalism, and he highlighted some of the technology that the publication is using to uncover the Web world’s news, including Hadoop
and assistance from Ravel Data.

“It’s one thing to crawl, it’s another to understand the community,” Daily Dot CEO White told Kirkpatrick. “What we really offer is thinking about how the community ticks. The gestures and modalities on Reddit are very different from Youtube; it’s sociological, not just math.”